Crypt, Mimicry, Genealogy: The Languages of Trauma in Hanna Krall’s The Subtenant

Abstract

In the article Crypt, Mimicry, Genealogy: Languages of Trauma in Hanna Krall’s Subtenant, I interpret Krall’s novel through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, research on genealogical imagination, and trauma studies. In my view, these categories also have the potential to reshape the framework of the novel’s historical and literary positioning, as they make it possible to read Subtenant alongside other Jewish narratives of the same period—texts equally misaligned with the norms of collective memory, as they articulate the unsettling experiences of the “subtenant” diaspora, which preserved the memory of the Holocaust and of Polish antisemitism, and gave expression to genealogies and “impure” family histories deemed non-normative from the perspective of Polish culture.